#minuchin gang unite

[luckysheepharmony]

Why didn't Lennon/McCartney get therapy for their issues?

As a family/couple therapist in my day job and mclennon obsessive at night, I want to correct some overly positive views I feel people on this site often have about therapy and its potential.

Therapy, like anything else, is the product of its environment and the social attitudes of its time. While I'd love to imagine 1969 John and Paul getting couples therapy and living happily ever after, sadly, I have a more jaded view of my profession. Homosexuality was identified as a mental disorder in the DSM 2 (published 1968). Although the wording of this was softened in 1974 to reflect social pressures put on the psychiatric profession by gay liberation groups (suddenly we queers became officially less mad than before!) the DSM 3 (published 1980) still classified "ego-dystonic homosexuality" as a mental illness. (The difference, practically speaking, is that people were no longer deemed as being mad for being gay on its own; they were only mad if living in a homophobic society made them feel sad about being gay. That was, according to the dsm, a problem of the individual, not society. If we take DSM-II (1974 revision) to its natural conclusion, a mentally normal homo in 1974 would simply have skipped along the street, delighting in receiving the punches of strangers and rejection of their close friends and families for their perverted ways; but anyone feeling sadness about how they were treated and maybe feeling bad about being gay as a result should have got therapy to make that problematic sadness go away.) Any therapist, individual or couple, valuing their licence in the late 60s/early 70s would be working within this framework within their profession, as well as the wider social and their own personal attitudes towards homosexuality and bisexuality.

There is also the constraint of the particular therapeutic training. Psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapy, for example, wouldn't allow LGBTQ people to train as therapists even as late as 2000. I had my own therapy back then (from a nationally known, respectable institution) as a troubled bisexual adolescent, and my therapist kept trying to perform conversion therapy on me, which was technically unethical back in 2000 but many therapists at that time still persisted in these attitudes, feeling it was most ethical to try and cure their patients' mental illness by changing their homo ways (rather than wondering if it was, in fact, society that was sick rather than the individual queer). Luckily I had sufficient self belief, undiagnosed autism and general stroppiness (together with being backed up with the more positive social attitudes towards queers in 2000 when compared to 1970) to tell them to fuck off, but I doubt I would have been able to do that in 1970, even if I had happened to be a Beatle suffering from extreme internalised homophobia and self loathing, desperately wanting to be straight.

If I was a celebrity, I would also not want to chat my business with some random stranger for fear the therapist may try to sell my story. John, I think, might have been OK taking the risk, being the outspoken edgelord he was, but we could certainly rule out the more cautious Paul for this reason alone.

Under all these conditions, even if Lennon wasn't seeing quacks, I can't see how even my favourite 1970 therapist, Salvador Minuchin, could have helped Lennon or Lennon/McCartney with their issues at this time.

A therapist from today, with our revisionist eyes, would of course do things differently than those back then. But unfortunately, as far as I know, even the Beatles didn't have access to a time machine. Therefore, in my professional opinion, mclennon would not have been helped by 1970s therapy. Please understand that doesn't mean I think today's therapists are better than those practicing 60 years ago; I just think today's social attitudes towards LGBTQ people are better than they were 60 years ago. Currently. Let's see how Trump gets on with making America great again.

I think what it comes down to is that it just wasn't soon enough for John and Paul to stand on top of a mountain with their flag unfurled. So just standard mclennon tragedy things then.